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March 2022: two years of covid, with covid

Last updated: Mar 31, 2022

It’s been months again. I realised it’s easy to not write when I’m only writing about specific things, so this time I’m gonna try something new, inspired by @harryfk.

At first I was like “is it ok to start in March?”, but what is time anyway?

Making it work

This month we celebrated two years since the day I worked from home for the first time due to the pandemic. It was Friday the 13th, in 2020. Afterwards I packed the food I had in my shared flat and took the train to my partner’s one room apartment without knowing exactly when it would make sense to go back home.

Guess what: it didn’t.

We kind of tried to look for a bigger apartment for some time, but ask anyone in Berlin about that and you’ll get an idea of how hard it is to find something that feels right and you can afford. Eventually we just made it work where we are, I sold my furniture and found someone else to take over the contract for my room.

Two years later, it turns out the wait actually paid off: next month we’re moving into a bigger flat! Across the hall! The easiest move we could ever have imagined. Still feels surreal that we’re moving to another apartment on the same floor, but I can’t wait to finally be able to spread our bedroom/living room/office situation into different spaces. I hope I’ll have a lot to write about that in the next months!

It finally got us

When I say “we celebrated”, that’s not actually true. It turns out that Covid decided to show up around here on the weekend we were supposed to celebrate two years of dodging it. My partner tested positive first and about a week later it was my turn. Luckily, I only had mild cold symptoms for a couple of days, but the coughing has been there for about two weeks now.

Spending a whole week on sick leave was definitely challenging. It’s weird to have time when you’re not really supposed to be enjoying it. It’s also weird how easy it is to feel guilty for taking care of yourself when you’re not feeling sick to the point where you’re not able to do things. I’m the first person to tell everyone else to take their time when they’re not feeling 100%, but it was quite hard to take my own advice.

Watching

One interesting thing that came out of this week of trying to do nothing was that, after questioning many times why people subscribe to so many streaming services at once when even just one is already overwhelming enough, I ended up trialing pretty much all of them.

By far the easiest in terms of decision making when we didn’t know what to watch was Disney+, as all the classics are just there and I can always rewatch Alice in Wonderland!

That being said, I have two recommendations from this week of binge watching:

Reading

Ironically, this month I finished How to do nothing, by Jenny Odell. I must admit I expected a bit more from this book, but there were some interesting insights among all the bird-noticing and Californian landscapes.

I didn’t mean to follow-up with such a similar subject, but because I want to join a bookclub next week, I’m currently reading I didn’t do the thing today, by Madeleine Dore. I’m enjoying it quite a lot apart from being distracted by how many times she writes “ebb and flow”. I find the current trend of questioning what we read about productivity and where it got us fascinating.

Other bookmarks

Some other things I came across this month:



And that’s a wrap on my first monthly recap. If you got here somehow and would like to, feel free to reach out and say hi! Hope to see you next month!